I grew up in an age of television without remote controls or cable. I remember when the television was an actual piece of furniture. Like many families back in the day, my dad came home from work and tuned in to the news. No one really monitored what flashed across the screen before us. Helicopter parenting was not in our collective vernacular then. Mostly I was disinterested in the news and wailed when my dad trumped our choices, leaving us to watch 60 Minutes instead of the Wonderful World of Disney.
Those moments I did stop and pay attention to the news on television, one thing was glaring time after time. I used to wonder why I never saw news about people who looked like me. I was born in India and didn’t see many faces like mine in the towns I grew up in in Virginia. Mine was the only brown face most of the time. When people spoke about India or other such places, it was with wistful notions of exoticism or counter sighs of pity. I knew as a young child that the world, my own small world and the macro globe around me, didn’t care about my heritage. And that’s when I stopped embracing it and defending it. I succumbed to believing what was fed to me by the media. The pull of media on young minds is magnetic, and no parent can break that once it’s taken hold. I was entering middle school and eschewed everything that made me different, short of changing my name, which I would have done if I could. To the world my color was invisible, and I wanted to erase my brown self too.
The implications of these dynamics weren’t apparent to me until much later into adulthood.
When I was in sixth grade I had to choose a word of the week to help build my classmates’ vocabulary. My bony fingers flipped to the X tab in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. I was hellbent on choosing something unique yet meaningful. I settled on xenophobia. It sounded grand, different, and impressive. Little did I know just what a perfect word it would become in my own internal dialog.
Western media is still blinded by its own brand of xenophobia. The news hasn’t really changed in all these decades, and the rhetoric about the world being a global community is utter bullshit. I don’t see faces like mine on the news. There are tragedies in all corners of the world, and the most horrific are not on our national radar. My God, over 2000 people were brutally murdered in Nigeria, as if there’s any other way, while we derided our President and watched football. Boko Haram rages on, leaving women, children, and the elderly in its bloody wake. The body count was so great that they stopped counting. There are no words to adequately describe the brazen lack of humanity here. Our lack of attention to this story perpetuates this lack of humanity.
If 2000 white faces were murdered we would be listening, watching, and dare I say it, caring.
In a simple diversion from the weight of the world, my family and I watched the Golden Globes pre-show the other night. We gawked at the dresses and made a list of all the movies we missed last year. While flipping between two channels watching the pre-show, my 11 year old son asked why there were only white people being interviewed. It took me back to what nagged me when I was just his age. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Our media doesn’t care about brown people. I took note of it when I was a child and am painfully disheartened that my own son sees it too.
I have an 11 year old questioning what he sees on TV.
Boko Haram uses children the same as suicide bombers.
Are we paying attention yet?